


a song someone will sing for me

by Verbyna



Series: call me son (one more time) [7]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Adultery, Age Difference, Bisexual Female Character, Friendship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Mentors, Queer Themes, alicia "future terrifying society matron" zimmermann and her hockey player arm candy, can't throw a stone in here without hitting a lee mcqueen reference, lying on floors listening to lana del rey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-25
Updated: 2017-09-25
Packaged: 2019-01-05 09:24:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12187305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Verbyna/pseuds/Verbyna
Summary: Bob likes them young and blond and weighed down by his secrets. So much shame, Alicia thinks. And for what?





	a song someone will sing for me

**Author's Note:**

> blithelybonny, summerfrost & i didn't think we'd get to this point, but we're sure enjoying the ride.

The dinner goes on and on after Alicia’s already squeezed tens of thousands for her foundation out of the people she was sat with. She’s wearing 2001 McQueen, scales and train and all. It doesn’t stop the people around her from being fucking _dull._

She claps at speeches and chokes down something borderline-endangered until she’s finally released with her bag full of checks. Her driver for the night is new, local boy, and he cuts in front of one of her donors’ cars to meet her schedule. He doesn’t try to make conversation on the way to her building, which further raises him in her estimate.

He must’ve asked around. People do that, when it comes to Alicia. She sets a reminder on her phone to ask her assistant about him and then watches the city crawling past, dress too much like armor now that she’s cocooned in the car.

Jack hasn’t texted.

Her friends would tell her to give him space, but almost all her friends are long dead. She wipes her hands on the dress: slide-catch. 

In the lobby, Philippe says, “Monsieur Parson.” He points up.

 

+

 

She finds Kent in the family room, listening to that _Born to Die_ vinyl one of the interns gave her in a first-week attempt to curry favor. Alicia taught Kent how to use a turntable, once upon a time, and every time he sleeps at her apartment he leaves them strewn across the floor. Nothing else, though; he comes in when she’s away and cleans after himself, and she reads into the mess he left on purpose, the things he won’t say out loud.

He’s lying on his back on the floor now, golden hair a tangled mess hovering stiffly an inch above the hardwood. A tuxedo jacket is draped across the couch, and his eyes are closed; she hates that she can’t go to him yet, can’t kiss his bruised knuckles and tell him it’s going to be okay.

Jack hasn’t called since the wedding reception. Bob hasn’t called either.

So much shame, she thinks. And for what?

 

+

 

Once upon a time, Alicia was a nineteen-year-old Chicago transplant in L.A. She went to a hockey game because her dad would’ve asked her about it.

And then she saw Bob: blood everywhere, helping a teammate back to his feet.

Once upon a time, choices were easy.

 

+

 

She doesn’t want to leave Kent by himself now that she’s home. He has that look on his face like he did something awful, that shock at himself that she associates with people coming off a relapse binge, and he clearly didn’t want to be alone if he came over when he knew she’d be home.

She goes behind the bar and takes her dress off; she left a dressing gown on the floor there, some designer freebie in dark green silk with feathers that fly off if she moves too fast. The McQueen dress she lays out on the bar top, carefully. She remembers that hour before Lee’s show started when they were forced to stare at themselves in surveillance glass as one of the most uncomfortable of her life, and then the show itself, the catharsis, the year it took her to convince Lee to let her wear the dress. She wishes, as she always has since meeting him, that Kent could’ve seen it.

She took him to Lee’s last show, but he didn’t get it. He would’ve gotten _Voss._

Across the bar, Kent’s sitting up and unbuttoning his shirt. Alicia makes them a couple of gin and tonics and goes to sit next to him on the floor. The record keeps playing; she reaches across the gap between them to take his hand, but they don’t look at each other.

The dress looks like a corpse. God, how she misses Lee. How she misses the old days when she wasn’t middle-aged, _quelque peu romain mais au temps de la décadence_ \- the old haunts and people who saw past the gloss into the heart of her. All she has left of it now is Kent, bare-chested and miserable, drinking her gin.

“We do things to ourselves,” she says, but she can’t think of a way to finish the sentence. Kent squeezes her fingers.

“Has he called?” he asks, meaning Jack, of course. He always means Jack. How her son ended up being the love of someone like Kent’s life is a mystery to her.

“He didn’t. Has he?” she asks, meaning Bob. She doesn’t need to look to know the pained grimace on Kent’s face. “Is he--”

“Not coping. Took me skating and then radio silence, the perfect fucking prick.”

“Alliteration.”

“Fuck my entire life,” Kent says. “He was there, and - Jesus. He was there. He’s still there, I can’t stop seeing how he’s there anymore. Do you--”

Alicia lays her head on his shoulder, turns her face to the ceiling so their hair tangles together. “I don’t hate you. I wish you’d told me. I don’t, though. Hate you. He does this thing--”

“Makes himself seem real,” Kent finishes.

They drink.

 

+

 

Bob wouldn’t let her speak English to Jack, to start. He said Jack would learn it eventually, but he’d always sound fake Quebecois if French wasn’t his first language.

Alicia wasn’t fluent yet. She watched the nanny comforting Jack, heard the jarring accent, knew hers was better even if she didn’t understand what she was saying. She was still in touch with her dialect coach. The nanny was a twentysomething from Montreal who refused to answer anything in English, and it irked Alicia that she sounded so soft when she talked to Jack when she was a fucking bitch otherwise.

 _I’m your mother,_ she thought. _Régarde-moi._ But Jack only reacted to the sound of her voice, reading him fairytales or trying not to swear on the phone.

Years later, when Jack was seventeen, over five hundred miles from her, Kent told her that Jack’s panic attacks were in French. She taught Kent the right words, corrected his pronunciation until it was something Jack understood.

And then she taught Kent how to use a turntable. How to speak to a tailor. How to answer an interviewer. How to live outside the place where he needed to be without screaming, because neither of them could call Jack _sweetheart_ without sounding like they were reading off a prompter.

They sure as fuck couldn’t say it in French. Bob came out to her in French, and all Alicia could dredge up was _oui._

 

+

 

She doesn’t ask Kent if he loves Bob. What he’ll do if Bob spirals out again and goes to Kent this time instead of her. She doesn’t ask for the impossible, but she doesn’t know how to tell Kent that it’s all right, that she was there, that she guarded Bob’s closet door and hated herself for it - bisexual as the day is long and no one took it seriously, a hockey player’s beard and Bob couldn’t even say the word “bisexual” until after the first time he cheated on her after the baby.

Alicia’s friends used to ask her if it was worth giving up her career. Becoming a joke, some of them said. She told them she wasn’t laughing.

She knows that Kent built a self-flagellation chamber in the back of the closet. She knows he goes there even though she taught him how to be shameless. That the whole point of people like them is to live through what others can’t.

There’s nothing she can say to convince him that she doesn’t blame him for being the bit on the side. Bob likes them young and blond and weighed down by his secrets.

 

+

 

Jack hasn’t texted, and neither has his husband. Alicia feels bad for how the day went down, but if Eric can’t handle the full brunt of her son, he doesn’t belong with Jack at all. 

No one else does. Or rather, no one does. What a terrible fucking thing to think right after Jack’s wedding, that he doesn’t belong anywhere. She hoped he’d get back together with Kent, so Jack could at least be loved for what he really is, but he chose someone who wouldn’t remind him of the past instead.

The only parts of Jack that Alicia understands are the ones he got from Bob. There’s almost nothing of herself there. The eyes, maybe. The color and the way they slide off anything they don’t want to see.

 

+

 

She runs a bath after they finish their second round of g&t. She leaves the door open, and five minutes after she gets in, Kent comes in with a bottle of her good champagne. He changed the record to Bowie and turned it up. Alicia pats the side of the tub and he sits on the floor again; he didn’t bring glasses.

“We haven’t done this in a while,” Alicia says, and takes the bottle from him. “Light me a cigarette, atta boy.”

He smiles at her over the “boy,” digs through the bottom drawer of her vanity without getting up until he finds the cigarette holder and a book of matches. She runs her fingers through his hair while he lights one.

“I had this friend,” she says. “Did I tell you? Movie producer in Vancouver. He always said I should write a book about my life and he’d make it into a movie. I’d actually started to write it when he died. I reached the part right before Bob came out to me, and I was going to tell Jamie that the whole thing was off, but then he died and I didn’t have to explain anything.”

“Shit, I didn’t know. When was this?”

She hums, takes a drag and blows out the smoke over the top of Kent’s head. “Right before Jack left for Rimouski. Yeah, I came back from the funeral and helped him pack. I was crying all the time, and I think I almost came out to him, god. So at least some of the story went out into the world. I was a mess that whole year.”

Kent holds his hand out for the cigarette and trades it for the bottle. They do that for a while, and then Kent says, “I never apologized for outing you to him.”

“I’m sure Jack deserved it, but I didn’t.”

He turns to look at her, takes in the fine lines on her face and her pruned fingers around the cigarette. Ten years he’s been fucking Bob, she thinks, twelve years he’s been in love with her son, and she’d bet anything that he never looked at them like this. Never been allowed to be kind to either of them.

“You deserve the world,” he says, and it breaks her heart. She leans over to press her mouth against his forehead, sloshes water over the edge of the tub onto his chest.

“So do you,” she whispers. “Beautiful boy. Look what they’ve done to you.”

Kent turns all the way around and puts his arms around her; she’s not sure, but she thinks he’s crying. She would spit in Bob face right now if she could, shake some sense into Jack, but instead she lets Kent hide his face in her shoulder, saying _sorry, sorry, sorry_ until he lets himself believe she forgave him.

**Author's Note:**

> all of lee's shows except for his student showcases are on youtube if you're curious
> 
> i'm still @soundslikepenance on tumblr, still not sorry


End file.
